For Workers Revolution
Against the Islamic Dictatorship!Mass Protests
Rock Iran:
No to All Wings of the Mullah
Regime!U.S. Imperialism Hands
Off!

For more
than a week, Iran has been convulsed
by mass demonstrations denouncing
election fraud. Hundreds of
thousands have repeatedly taken to
the streets to denounce the
government, which is now
threatening, and beginning to carry
out, a bloody crackdown. This time
around, imperialist intervention is
veiled: the White House feigns
neutrality, the Western media go all
out for the opposition, while in the
background various agencies provide
vital technical aid. In reality, all
candidates in the presidential vote
swear allegiance to the Islamic
Republic, and the supposed moderate
reformers are no less butchers and
enemies of poor and working people
than the conservative “populist”
government. The situation cries out
for revolutionary leadership
independent of all factions of the
theocracy, to wage a struggle for
workers revolution against
imperialism and clerical reaction. Mass
Protests
Rock Iran: No to All Wings of the
Mullah Regime

For Workers
Revolution Against Mullah Rule!Iran’s Islamic
Republic in Turmoil –
What Program for Struggle?Free Jailed Protesters and Labor
Activists!
U.S. Imperialists Hands Off!

Iran is
still wracked with turmoil a month
and a half after the hotly disputed
presidential elections. Aggressive
attacks on demonstrators by
repressive forces under the command
of President Ahmadinejad and Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Khamenei have not
been able to stop the
demonstrations. So far protests have
hewed to the political limits laid
down by the theocratic regime, but
if the struggle deepens against an
increasingly militarized regime,
that could be called into question.
Most of the left internationally has
fallen into line either behind the
hard-line government or the Islamist
“reformers” led by
former prime minister Mousavi. Yet
the contending camps are both
committed to maintaining clerical
capitalist rule. While fighting
against the “electoral coup d’état,”
Trotskyists say Iranian workers
should seek not to install Mousavi
in office but to raise democratic
demands, including for a
revolutionary secular constituent
assembly, as part of a struggle to
establish their own class rule, by
bringing down the Islamic Republic
and establishing a workers and
peasants government that initiates
socialist revolution. Iran’s
Islamic
Republic in Turmoil –What Program
for Struggle?

Mobilize the Workers To
Defeat the Putsch!Honduras: Coup
d’État in the Maquiladora RepublicYankee Imperialism, Hands
Off!
For a Federation of Workers Republics
of Central America!In
the early morning of Sunday, June 28, some 200
soldiers of the Honduran army kidnapped the
president of the republic, Manuel Zelaya
Rosales, at gunpoint and expelled him from the
country. This first coup of the presidency of
Barack Obama awakened fears of a return to the
“years of blood,” when Honduras served as a
launching pad for Nicaraguan contras
and Salvadoran death squads which sowed terror
throughout Central America. The overthrow was
opposed by virtually every international
governmental organization, the U.S. secretary
of stated claimed she condemned it, Venezuelan
president Hugo Chávez vowed to overthrow the
usurpers, but the military mutineers are still
in power. Revolutionary Marxists stress that
to defeat the coup we can only count on
mobilizing the working people, in Honduras as
well as throughout Central America, in Mexico
and the rest of the continent. Honduras:
Coup
d’État in the Maquiladora Republic

Sweep Away the Coup
Plotters, Generals and Capitalists!
Fight for a Workers and Peasants Government!Honduras: The First
Coup of the Obama AdministrationThe
ouster of President Manuel Zelaya by Honduran
generals at the end of June sent shudders
through Latin America. We warned the day after
the military takeover that those fighting
against it should beware of U.S. intervention
(rather than appeal for it). Whether
Republicans or Democrats are in power, U.S.
imperialism is still the power behind the most
reactionary forces in the hemisphere. The U.S.
government as a whole, not just one putative
faction, was preparing the ouster of Zelaya.
For the past month, Honduran trade unions,
peasant and indigenous groups have been
insistently mobilizing in the streets against
the civilian-military dictatorship. A real
general strike that shut down the
maquiladoras, banana and mining sectors,
cutting off Honduran exports would have a
considerable impact. But that represents a
whole different political orientation,
organizing on a program of internationalist
class struggle rather than on the
bourgeois-democratic and nationalist basis
that has dominated so far. The important
participation of the unions in the resistance
should be used not to restore conditions to
what they were on June 27, but to fight
against all the capitalist politicians and
their system that has condemned three-quarters
of the Honduran population to a life of
misery. Honduras:
The First Coup of the Obama
Administration

“Bolshevik
Bobbies”? You’ve Got to Be KiddingHer
Majesty’s Social Democrats in Bed with the
PoliceBritain: The Logic of
Labourite ReformismOn April 1 and 2, British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown played host to delegations
of politicians and bankers from 19 other leading
capitalist powers at the Group of 20 (G20)
summit in London. While “world leaders” huddled
to plan new rounds of slashing cuts to public
services and trillions in handouts to the
biggest banks, tens of thousands of protesters
attempted to assemble to voice their opposition
to the plans of the rulers. Instead the “forces
of order” gratuitously beat, slammed, shoved,
manhandled and “kettled” the demonstrators.
Britain’s ostensibly socialist left naturally
condemned the cop violence, but how to stop it
is another matter. The Socialist Party of
England and Wales, the leading section of the
Committee for a Workers International (CWI) led
by Peter Taaffe, called for investigations and
changing police “tactics.” “Bringing the police
to accept responsibility,” suggested the Socialist Appeal group
in the Labour Party, the mother group of the
International Marxist Tendency (IMT) led by Alan
Woods. Both groups, epigones of
the Militant tendency of Ted
Grant, consider the police to
be “workers in uniform.”
While accurate when applied to soldiers
conscripted into the army, this is dead wrong
when applied to the police, which is a body of
professional agents of repression. Yet no matter how much bloody
evidence cops serve up to the contrary, the CWI
and IMT persistently raise their “trade union
rights” and lobby the labor movement to admit
these deadly enemies of labor with open arms. Her Majesty’s Social
Democrats in Bed with the Police (July 2009)

Obama/Democrats’
Conciliation Emboldens ReactionariesAssassination of Courageous
Doctor in Wichita:War
on Abortion Rights EscalatesMobilize to
Defend the Clinics!Abolish
All Restrictions – For Free
Abortion on Demand!

The vile
murder of the courageous abortion
doctor George Tiller marks an
escalation of the war on women’s right
to abortion. The constitutional
protection hangs by a thread – a
single vote in the Supreme Court. The
“god squads” are in a frenzy,
harassing women patients and abortion
providers at the clinics. The reaction
of the bourgeois feminists has been to
look to the Democratic Party and the
government of Barack Obama in the
White House. Yet the Democrats are not
allies but enemies of women’s rights.
Obama opposes the late-term abortions
that Dr. Tiller provided while seeking
“common ground” with the
Bible-thumping bigots who harbor the
abortion doctor killers. And the
police, from local cops to the FBI,
give a free pass to the assassins,
whom they know well. Assassination
in
Wichita
–
War
on
Abortion
Rights
Escalates(11 June
2009)

On July 7,
after 325 days on strike, workers at
the Stella D’oro bakery in the Bronx
went back to work under the contract
that the company management had
ripped up. The scabs who had
replaced them were gone. Yet while
workers were glad to be back on the
job, the owners viciously announced
they would shut the plant for good.
With their steadfastness, the
strikers beat back one attack. Now
they face a new assault that is just
as serious. For Stella D’oro workers
and all New York labor, la
lucha continúa – the
struggle continues! At
Stella D’oro, the Struggle Continues

NYC Labor: Scab Cookies Are “Too Hot to
Handle”!Mobilize New York Unions’ Power
to Win the Stella D'Oro Strike!

The struggle
of the bakery workers at the Stella
d’Oro cookie factory in the Bronx, on
strike since last August 15, has
reverberated through New York City
labor. The company’s use of low-paid
scab labor to run the struck factory
is a threat to unions throughout the
city. But paper resolutions expressing
fine sentiments of labor solidarity
are not enough. The fact is, NYC union
officialdom has not actually done
anything to use its power to win the
strike. If it had, the strike would
have ended in a victory months ago. We
need to massively mobilize NYC labor
in action to beat the union-busters at
Stella D’Oro! Mobilize
New
York
Unions’
Power
to
Win
the
Stella D'Oro Strike!

“Theoretical”
Justification
for
Abstentionism,
and
Tailing
After
the
PRDFlim Flam from
the GEM on Workers ControlIn a curious “polemic” titled “Menshevik
Symptomology,” the Grupo Espartaquista de
México continues its customary practice
consisting of stringing together scholastic
arguments adorned with amalgams and sophistry,
all in order to justify its opportunist and
tailist policies. In practice it puts forth
policies which mimic those of the
bourgeois-nationalist Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD) and its former presidential
candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It
doesn’t call for any workers action
against the step-by-step privatization of the
state oil company Pemex in the counterreform
law of the Calderón government, and
polemicizes against our call for workers
control. These
anti-dialectical “theoreticians” claim
that this slogan of the Transitional Program
can only be applied in a revolutionary
situation. Yet they quote an article by Leon
Trotsky saying the exact opposite of what they
claim. Nowhere in its writings about Mexico and the
global crisis of the capitalist economy does
the GEM present a program of transitional
demands to serve as a bridge between the
present struggles of the working class and
socialist revolution. Flim
Flam from the GEM on Workers Control

From the Great Miners’ Strike of
1906 to Today: Revolutionary Leadership Is
Key Cananea: A Century of
Internationalist Class StruggleJune 1, 2006
marked the centenary of the copper mine
strike at Cananea. The conglomerate that
now operates the mines, Grupo México,
tried to prevent the commemoration; the
militant miners of of Latin America’s
largest copper mine responded by going on
strike. Now they have gone on strike
again, as they have almost every year
since 1999. This history of militancy goes
back to the 1906 Cananea miners strike,
one of the key events leading up to the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-17. Much has
been written about the 1906 strike from
the standpoint of Mexican nationalism. But
contrary to nationalist myths, that
proletarian revolt was a joint effort by
anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary
minded Mexican and American workers, who
carried red flags at the head of their
marches. In the recent strikes as well as
one hundred years ago, the key factor is
the need for a class-struggle leadership,
a revolutionary internationalist party. Cananea:
A
Century of Internationalist Class Struggle(December 2007)

Strike in Cananea, Sombrerete, and
Taxco in Fifth MonthMexican
Miners Strike for Safety, Against
Anti-Worker AttacksCopper miners in
Cananea, in the northern Mexican state of
Sonora, have been on strike since the end
of July over the deadly dangerous working
conditions and anti-worker attacks by the
management and government. Cananea, the
largest open-pit copper mine in the world,
has been owned by the billionaire Germán
Larrea and his Grupo México since it was
privatized in 1990. The criminally
negligent safety conditions at the
mine and smelter have been
documented by an international commission
of medical and industrial safety experts.
The miners are facing the full force of
Mexico's corporatist system of state
control of labor, including the national
miners’ “union” which in the past has
repeatedly sided with the government and
the bosses against its own members. The “independent”
unions which politically support the
opposition PRD (Party of the Democratic
Revolution) have notably failed to back
the striking miners. Class-conscious
workers in Mexico must defend the striking
miners, while fighting to break the
corporatist stranglehold, build workers
unions free of all ties to the bourgeois
state and capitalist parties, and forge a
revolutionary workers party. Mexican
Miners
Strike for Safety(15 December
2007)

Police Takeover Fails – Miners
ResistMexico: Cananea
Must Not Stand Alone! For a Nationwide
Miners Strike!Down with the PRI,
PAN and PRD, Parties of the
Bourgeoisie! Forge a Revolutionary
Workers Party!Once again the
Mexican government of Felipe Calderón has
run aground on the resistance of the
battle-hardened miners of Cananea. On
January 11, as the federal Labor Board
declared their six-month-old strike
“non-existent” and ordered miners back to
work, an army of 1,000 state and federal
police invaded the mining town in the
northern state of Sonora. The miners did not
surrender and instead put up a stubborn
resistance. As a result, a
federal court issued an injunction
blocking the government back-to-work
order. Despite a government vendetta
against it, the leadership of the
corporatist mineworkers organization has
followed the dictates of Mexico’s corporatist
labor legislation, copied from Mussolini’s fascist Italy.
The Grupo Internacionalista has called for
a nationwide miners strike in solidarity
with the strikers, and for a national
strike against the anti-worker policies of
the Calderón government. In Oaxaca,
Atenco, Lázaro Cárdenas in 2006, and now
again in Cananea, the workers have put up
a tenacious resistance against the deadly
ruling-class attack. However, they are
stuck in a cycle of endless resistance
when there should be a struggle for power.
For that, a revolutionary workers party is
needed. Mexico:
Cananea Must Not Stand Alone!(1 February 2008)